The Politics of the Stars and Stripes

By Christopher Shea

Getty Images

Exposing American voters to an image of the American flag while asking whom they plan to vote for shifts them toward the Republican Party, a new study finds—and effects of that exposure are still evident eight months later.

Researchers recruited some 200 potential voters in Fall 2008, about a month before the presidential election, through social-networking sites. Participants were queried two times before the election about their candidate preferences and other issues; again a few days after the election; and yet again in July 2009 (by which time participation had shrunk to 71 people).

During the second session, some participants were exposed to a small image of the American flag (one inch across, on most monitors), as they answered questions.

The sample was heavily skewed to the left, from the start. But compared with the control group, participants who saw the flag during the second session reported warmer feelings toward Republicans and John McCain. The effect was also evident in the voting reported in session three: Among those who voted for the two major-party candidates, people who had seen the flag preferred Barack Obama by a 73%-to-27% margin. Those who hadn’t seen the flag preferred him 84% to 16%.

The following summer, people who had seen the flag still gave President Obama a job-performance score that was worse than those who had not: 6.75 versus 8, on an eleven-point scale.

Like their Democratic peers, the relatively few Republicans and conservatives in the study also became more likely to vote Republican. Still, given the left-leaning nature of the sample, the researchers couldn’t rule out the possibility that seeing the flag moves people toward the center, as opposed to the right. But their best guess about what’s happening is that seeing the flag prompts people to move closer to the views of the prototypical American—as they see him or her.

It appears that this fictional uber-American is slightly right of center.

(In preparation for the study, the researchers asked 51 people whether one party or the other tended to “brandish the American flag more often.” Confirming the conventional wisdom about flag-pin politics, these people strongly felt that Republicans did so. Notably, 90% also said that their voting behavior would not be affected by seeing a flag.

Ethics footnote: The researchers limited themselves to studying only people from states in which either McCain or Obama was predicted to win heavily, in order that the the flag-priming experiment would be less likely to affect the election’s outcome!)